There remains the question of the co-ordination of the impressions
received materially by the senses. This co-ordination, for elementary
sensations, is evidently identical for all beings. The snail, his horn
being threatened, and man, his eye, make the same shrinking movement.
Identical acts can have as cause only identical realities, or ones
perceived as such. With judgment, we enter upon the mystery. If light
is constant, the judgment which admits its existence is variable
according to the species, and, in the higher species, according to
the individual. It is clear that all eyes are affected by light, but
we do not know to what degree, or according to what mode of spectral
decomposition. It is the same for all other senses. Even if the
reality of the sensible world be admitted, we are obliged to pronounce
cautiously upon the quality of this reality, as reality perceived and
judged. We then return to idealism, though having had a quite different
end in view. We must retrace our steps, contemplate anew the ironic
portress, and resign ourselves never to know anything save appearance.
Another fact, however, remains--another fortress, perhaps, reared
facing the other. This is, that matter existed before life. The gain
seems slight, but it is equivalent to saying that the phenomena
perceived by the senses are exterior to the senses which now perceive
them; and this perhaps means that, if life becomes extinct, matter
will survive life. The proposition of the idealists that the world
would come to an end if there were no longer any sensibilities capable
of feeling it, any intelligences capable of perceiving it, seems,
therefore, untenable. And yet what would a world be, that was neither
thought nor felt? We must recognize this, that when we think of a world
void of thought, it still contains our thought, or it is our thought
which contains it and animates it. Another phenomenon analogous to
this has, perhaps, contributed much to belief in the immortality of
the soul, namely, that we cannot conceive of ourselves as dead save
by thinking of this death, by feeling and seeing it. The idea of our
non-existence supposes, moreover, the life of our thought. That there
is here an illusion due to the very functioning of the mechanism of
thought is probable enough; but it is difficult not to take it into
account. It would seem somewhat high-handed to make abstraction of it.
We can attempt it, however, and try a new road leading "beyond
thought." The way would be to consider the general movement of the
things in which our thought itself is closely implicated, and by which
it is rigorously conditioned. Far, perhaps, from thought thinking life,
it is life that animates thought. What is anterior is a vast rhythmic
undulation, of which thought is but one of the moments, one of the
bounds.
The position taken by man outside the world to judge the world, is a
factitious attitude. It is, perhaps, only a game, and one that is too
easy. The division of man into two parts, thought, physical being,
one considering the other and pretending to contain it, is only a
philosophic amusement which becomes impossible the moment we stop to
consider. There is, in fact, a physic of thought. We know that it
is a product, measurable, ponderable. Unformulated externally, it
nevertheless manifests its physical existence by the weight which it
imposes upon the nervous system. It needs speech, writing, or some sort
of sign, in order to manifest itself externally. Telepathy, thought,
penetration, presentiment--if there be any facts in this category which
have really been verified--would in such a case be so many proofs of
the materiality of thought. But it is useless to multiply arguments in
favour of a fact which is no longer contested save by theology.
This fact of materiality gives thought a secondary place. It is
produced. It might not be. It is not primordial. It is a result, a
consequence--doubtless a property of the nervous system, or even of
living matter. It is then through a singular abuse, that we have become
accustomed to consider it isolated from the ensemble of its producing
causes.
But, if thought be a product, it is, none the less, productive in
its turn. It does not create the world, it judges it. It does not
destroy it, it modifies and reduces it to its measure. To know is to
frame a judgment; but every judgment is arbitrary, since it is an
accommodation, an average, and since two different physiologies give
different averages, just as they give different extremes. The path,
once again, after many windings, brings us back to idealism.
Idealism is definitely founded on the very materiality of thought,
considered as a physiological product. The conception of an external
world exactly knowable is compatible only with belief in the reason,
that is to say, in the soul, that is to say, furthermore, in the
existence of an unchangeable, incorruptible, immortal principle,
whose judgments are infallible. If, on the contrary, knowledge of
the world be the work of a humble physiological product, thought--a
product differing in quality, in modality, from man to man, species
to species--the world may perhaps be considered as unknowable, since
each brain or each nervous system derived from its vision and from its
contact a different image, or one which, if it was at first the same
for all, is profoundly modified in its final representation by the
intervention of the individual judgment.
If the same object produces the same image on the retina of an ox or
the retina of a man, it will not, doubtless, be concluded, therefore,
that this image is known and judged identically by the ox and the man.
There are no two leaves, there are no two beings, alike in nature. Such
is the basis of idealism and the cause of incompatibility with the
agreeable doctrines with which men continue to be entertained.
The reasons of idealism plunge deep down into matter. Idealism means
materialism, and conversely, materialism means idealism.
1904.